Feminist Porn? Not Quite

While I found this porn film entertaining to watch due to its supposedly feminist premise, and though it had an occasional hot scene, I ultimately found that it was too sexist and too jam-packed with sexually exploitative characters for me to be able to fully enjoy it.

Women On Top is a porn film with an interesting premise: it takes place in an alternate reality in which everyone lives in a matriarchal society. Women dominate this world in the same way that men dominate ours.

As a sex-positive feminist, I often find it difficult to locate porn that manages to be hot while also aligning with my social-sexual values (mainly, that women deserve just as much authentic pleasure as men do, and that men and women should be objectified in equal measure or not at all). When I read the basic premise of Women On Top, I hoped that it might be somewhat feminist and that therefore I could find it arousing without feeling conflicted about its values.

Women On Top is definitely not a feminist porn film, but it's still a decent porno.

The film starts with a group of women playing poker, smoking, and talking raunchily about their male partners. They freely admit to having high sex drives which their men cannot keep up with. I began to get turned on at the idea that maybe women in this universe had just as much sexual agency and guilt-free libido as men.

However, in the next scene, it became clear that I was wrong. Two men, preparing food in the kitchen, discuss the recurring problems they have with their sexually demanding female partners. The men are feminized, submissive, and sex-negative. They talk about sex as if it were something they only do to appease their partners. I was saddened to discover that this movie isn't about sexual equality or liberation at all; instead, it holds a mirror up to the most conservative, sex-negative pockets of Western society. The way the men talk in this film just serves to make fun of "prudish" women, even though women are only made prudish by society's overly rigorous expectations of women's sexual behaviour.

The male actors in this scene are amusing and kind of cute, but I don't find either of them sexually attractive. If you're looking for "hot man-meat," skip to at least the second sex scene.

In the first sex scene, the blonde wife (who, like all the women in this movie, conforms perfectly to our traditional notions of what "porn beauty" looks like, even though her character lives in a world where presumably she doesn't have to live up to looksist expectations) seduces her unwilling husband into having sex. He's very hesitant and hardly seems to be enjoying himself throughout the entire scene. He complains while eating her pussy, complains about uncomfortable positions, and complains when his partner reaches orgasm without bringing him to orgasm first. This extreme lack of enthusiasm is not only annoying, but also totally ruins any hotness that the scene could've had. The entire scene tries to strike an awkward balance between "funny" and "hot," and it succeeds at neither.

The next few sex scenes all take place within a male strip club and a male model agency, both managed by women. Since the men are supposed to be erotic dancers and models, they're a lot more attractive. They also put a lot more effort into the sex they have with their female superiors, and they also seem to be enjoying it more.

There are far more blowjobs and far less cunnilingus in this film than I would expect from a porno that's supposed to be about female dominance. The cunnilingus that IS featured is the kind that exists only in mainstream porn and in the beds of people who try to imitate mainstream porn: lots of quick tongue-flicking with pauses in between, to make it as camera-appropriate as possible, with no regard for what actually feels good.

The one exception is a scene toward the end, when the woman from the first scene cheats on her husband in order to receive oral sex from a man who wants her to give him a promotion. This man is way better at giving oral than any of the others. But it certainly didn't help my arousal that he had been coerced into sexually servicing his boss in exchange for preferential treatment at work.

To its credit, this film has better production values than most of the porn I've seen, and it does seem to feature real orgasms from people of both sexes. However, the exploitative female characters were morally troubling and I ultimately felt that the film was extremely sexist in the statements it made about how men and women act and feel in our own culture.

This product was provided free of charge to the reviewer. This review is in compliance with the
FTC guidelines.